‘Let’s finish the job’: Joe Biden, 80, announced his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election on Tuesday, promising to restore “dignity” to working-class America that his rival Donald Trump has partly seduced.
“I am a candidate for my re-election,” said the American president in a video posted on Twitter, associating the current vice-president Kamala Harris.
The three-minute message, posted at 6 a.m. Washington time, opens with images of Trumpists attacking the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Joe Biden hammers home a simple idea: he embodies the fight, still ongoing according to him, for freedom and democracy.
The Democrat has been confiding for months that he “intends” to represent himself. But April 25 is far from a trivial date to launch your campaign.
Tuesday marks the fourth anniversary, to the day, of Joe Biden’s last campaign entry, when he embarked on a battle for the “soul of America”, and deprived Donald Trump of a second mandate.
“Let’s finish the job!” he prompts in his video.
Since the beginning of the year, Joe Biden has hammered home his desire to give back to “forgotten” popular America, disturbed by globalization, a central place in society.
During a speech in the afternoon, the Democrat paid tribute to the “masons”, “painters”, “plumbers”, and workers of the country.
“It was the middle class, not Wall Street, that built America,” he told trade unionists.
He never ceases to recall the very ambitious reforms adopted on his initiative to reindustrialize America, attract cutting-edge technologies, accelerate the energy transition, and renovate infrastructures.
The main handicap of the Democrat, whose popularity rating remains poor, remains his age.
Never before had Americans elected such an old president, nor had a candidate asked them to leave him the keys to the White House until he was 86.
Joe Biden certainly displays unusual endurance, juggling between international crises and major reforms.
His trip to Kiev, an unprecedented initiative for the Head of State surrounded by the strictest security arrangements in the world, was a spectacular reminder of his role as architect of the Western response after the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.
Still, in a country where image is everything, where a candidate must overflow with vitality, the president cannot hide his age.
His pace is more cautious, his speech sometimes muddled and he has moments of confusion which the Republican opposition seizes on to question his mental acuity.
“Biden is so out of touch with reality that he thinks he deserves four more years in power,” Opposition Leader Ronna McDaniel said Tuesday morning.
In a dystopian video, Republicans imagine what 4 more years of Biden’s presidency would look like: bombs on Taiwan, looted stores, hordes of migrants at the borders…
But Joe Biden has noted that, according to the polls, the candidacy of his predecessor Donald Trump, 76 years old and indicted by a New York court, is no more enthusiastic than his own.
The Democrat therefore believes that if he once beat his Republican rival, a divisive figure par excellence, he can do it again by highlighting his good-natured personality and his unifying program.
His campaign site already offers mugs, t-shirts and stickers bearing the image of the “Biden-Harris” tandem.
One big unknown remains: what would Joe Biden’s chances be if he faced a younger opponent in November 2024?
The name of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a 44-year-old hard-right figure, is circulating widely. But he has not yet declared himself.
25/04/2023 19:33:32 – Washington (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
